Digital Library Projects headspace

Here we are half way through the fall semester, and we are well on our way in production. I have one incredible student worker who is plugging away at scanning and post-production. Here is an example of the finished product. We have provided both the page scan, as well as cropped images of each individual swatch. http://digitalcommons.kent.edu/grimshawsilk/6/ We will continue to add to this collection over the coming months, as well as other digital projects in the works. The 1950s decade of the Daily Kent Stater is about to be shipped off for digitization and encoding. This will be added to our current interface for search and display of the Kent Staters, http://www.library.kent.edu/dks

We are currently in the works on a number of digital projects here at Kent State this fall. We have a number of projects in queue for scanning, and over the summer we were able to: Review and collate the 1970s decade of the student newspaper, the Daily Kent Stater. The volumes have been organized and shipped out for scanning (Photo below) Set up a student work station for a Digital Projects student assistant to begin work this fall semester Began work on new Image Galleries for our Digital Commons instance, with the second gallery completed last week highlighting video content from the Kent State University Museum. We will have some sample of the Grimshaw fabric swatch collection up in the coming weeks that was mentioned in a previous blog post. Plan to add a crowdsourcing OCR correction piece for our digital Daily Kent Stater platform. Details to come later in the year. Can you believe these boxes contain over 16,000 pages that will be scanned, encoded and put up o...

We are starting to kick-off some digital projects here at the Kent State University Library, and identifying some great content from not only our main library, but also the branch and regional libraries. Our first project will be to digitize two bound books of fabric swatches from the Grimshaw Brothers Silk company, dating from the late 19th century. The paper is quite brittle, but the fabric swatches are in surprisingly good condition. We will scan these swatches in a high DPI on an overhead scanner. Our hope is to build a collection that may be of use for our Fashion program here at Kent State. The Tech Style Lab on campus has been a great resource to consult during our research phase. With these scans, users could use the small fabric samples to create larger pieces of fabric and perhaps create new designs using some of these swatches. I've included a sample page below. Check back for more details later this fall.

Really enjoyed this year's Digital Preservation conference in Washington DC- the annual meeting of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and the National Digital Stewardship Alliance. It proved to be a good variety of perspective and types of libraries/archives/museums/repositories throughout. I've put together some of my notes below that might be of interest for others- Enjoy! I hope to get the chance to return to the conference down the road sometime. Tuesday, July 22nd An Overview of NDSA  Advancing the Capacity to Preserve our Nation's Digital Resources, National Digital Steward Alliance, Micah Altman  ( presentation  slides) No-one needs digital preservation for its own sake (the hardware/tools/platforms), but rather for the long-haul. Equation to scientific research needs a cumulative, traceable evidence base, as such we need long-term access to information in order to communicate to future generations and further build on knowledge bases. "...

While I was starting my research during a masters program in museum studies, I was very interested in the ethics of conservation, in a strictly physical sense with art works. At the time (circa 2002), the digital was too elusive for me, too mysterious to really grasp and get a handle of, and in some ways, it is still a bit of a mystery for most.  There are tried and true methods in physical conservation work for known materials like oil paints and stone, but with digital media the waters seem to be much more unknown and murky. We've probably all had the experience of a corrupt file or an old format that has no immediately available software solution to access it. In this regard, the digital format is quite fragile and dependent on a number of ways to access and read the file. One thing I've always thought was so difficult in the whole topic of migration is taking stock of all the implications in the digital life cycle of any media format- with questions like: What are we ...

I wanted to start a blog that would be a sounding board for my work in a brand new position at the University Library at Kent State University, as their Digital Projects Librarian. This is likely take the form of things I'm fired up about on that particular day, projects I feel inspired about (or frustrated by), and then likely some random rants along the way. A bit of background about where I am coming from- Coming into this new position at Kent is in many ways a full circle for me. I am a Kent native and twice over KSU alum. I've spent a good portion of my life in/around the Kent area, and am personally pretty thrilled to be back in the city limits for work. I most recently came from a position managing the institutional repository at Case Western Reserve University for the past 6 years as their Digital Librarian, and have also been teaching adjunct at the School of Library and Information Science at Kent State since 2011. Before that, I had worked in th...